Earlier this month, the AI hacking startup Horizon3 achieved a rare milestone: a $250 million funding round pushed its market valuation above $2 billion, making it a so-called double unicorn.
CEO Snehal Antani said he spent nearly two decades acquiring the skills he needed to build the business, which simulates cyberattacks on companies’ systems to identify vulnerabilities before real hackers can exploit them. The knowledge he gained turned out to be crucial, first when the tech funding market tightened and, later, when the bank where Horizon3 held all its money collapsed.
“I wanted to make sure I built the right experiences,” Antani, now 46, told Business Insider.
After graduating from college, he said he learned about launching products at IBM, organizational management at GE Capital, scaling a hypergrowth company at software maker Splunk, and leadership at the US Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. It was also at JSOC where Antani met Air Force veteran Anthony Pillitiere, his Horizon3 cofounder.
A different path
Antani’s path runs counter to the familiar Silicon Valley image of the college-dropout founder, embodied by figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who started Facebook and Microsoft, respectively, as teenagers. Yet research suggests successful founders are often older than startup-culture stereotypes imply. An MIT Sloan study published in 2020 analyzed 2.7 million US entrepreneurs and found that the average age of founders behind the fastest-growing 0.1% of new ventures was 45.
For Antani, the value of a later start was quickly put to the test. Three years after he founded Horizon3 in 2019, the tech funding environment abruptly changed, and the company suddenly had to make the cash it had raised last much longer than planned.
Antani said he recalled a lesson from the CEO of one of his former employers about how to weather an economic downturn: Rather than cut your way through it, sell your way through it. He said Horizon3 did both. The company found about $3 million in costs to cut or redirect, including changes to benefits, hiring plans, and other operating expenses. Then it reinvested that money in sales and marketing, which Antani said helped grow revenue nearly fivefold year over year.
Flirting with disaster
In 2023, Horizon3 came closer to disaster. As Silicon Valley Bank was collapsing, Antani said he got a text from an investor asking how much of the startup’s money was held there. His answer: “100%.”
By the time federal regulators took it over, Horizon3 had opened an account at another bank. But its funds in Silicon Valley Bank were frozen, and missing payroll could have triggered about $750,000 a day in California penalties — enough, Antani said, to put the company out of business within a week.
To prevent that from happening, Antani said he drew $1 million from a personal line of credit. He and his executive team then agreed to tell employees what was happening and what they were doing about it.
After regulators restored access to Horizon3’s Silicon Valley Bank funds, the company repaid Antani. He said the episode put to use the leadership lessons he learned at JSOC, particularly the importance of dealing with crises.
“It’s all about being steady, calm, controlled,” he said. “You can’t be panicked.”
One learning curve
For all the experience Antani brought to Horizon3, there was one part of the founder’s job he had never done before: fundraising. To overcome that gap, he said he treated his early investor meetings as a crash course, repeatedly refining his pitch deck, financial model, and market case in response to the questions he was asked.
“The first time, you kind of suck,” said Antani. “You have to invest in being a good storyteller.”
After dozens of investor meetings, Antani said he mastered his pitch and received two term sheets, one of which he chose for Horizon3’s $3.5 million seed round — the venture-capital firm SignalFire. (The company’s latest raise was co-led by NightDragon and NEA.)
Today, Horizon3 is far larger than the small team Antani started with, made up of former intelligence, special operations, and enterprise software veterans — mostly people he knew through his past work. The company, one of the earliest companies to bring the concept of an AI hacker to market, has about 7,000 customers globally and 550 employees. Antani said the experience he gained across different companies, roles, and environments made that possible.
“You don’t want to learn how to deal with HR issues for the first time as a founder,” he said. “You want to have learned that stuff ahead of time.”
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